In my opinion, from a UI standpoint, the results are rather sad. Don’t get me wrong, the applications themselves are awesome. There are some great, great ideas, and I will definitely pick up an Android phone as soon as I can. However, the user interfaces are all over the place.

There is no consistency. Many applications invent their own iconography and nomenclature for things. Most applications have custom buttons, windows, color schemes and widgets. Applications use different typefaces and font sizes, sometimes inconsistent within the same screen. The icon style seems to be undefined; some use flat icons, some have realistic pseudo-3D icons, some have even other icon styles; they all look different from each other.

Even worse, many applications have small, tightly placed buttons. These interfaces will be useless without a stylus; it seems these apps were designed to run inside the Android emulator, where they can be controlled using a mouse.

Frankly, while most of the application ideas themselves are awesome, the inconsistent (and, in a few cases, just poor) UI design is disheartening. Hopefully, these UI issues will be fixed before users get to try these applications.

Want to read more like this? Buy my book's second edition! Designed for Use: Create Usable Interfaces for Applications and the Web is now available DRM-free directly from The Pragmatic Programmers. Or you can get it on Amazon, where it's also available in Chinese and Japanese.

Hi. My name is Lukas Mathis. I studied Computer Science/Software Engineering and Ergonomics/Usability at ETH Zürich. I work as a software engineer and user interface designer for a swiss software company creating process management software. I've written a book about usability. It's been translated to Chinese and Japanese. My first computer was a Performa 450, my first programming language was HyperTalk, my first electric guitar was a cheap Peavey, my first videogame was a VCS 2600 and my current snowboard is from Lib Tech. I live in a small cottage in a remote part of the Swiss Alps, and you can reach me at or on twitter.